When Esquire’s chief left his job to focus more on internal development

Mar 21, 2010 When Esquire’s chief left his job to focus more on internal development

Phillip Moffitt is a former chief of Esquire magazine, who left his job there nearly a quarter century ago to focus more on his internal development. As he recounts:

“In those years that I was editor in chief with Esquire, I was also the chief executive officer. So, I had two jobs and it was a seven day a week situation. And with the amount of demand of attention on worldly matters — this constant demand of attention outward — I started losing what I call the inner felt sense of life unfolding inside. My life ended up being all about the outside with meeting all these obligations and creating all this work. The internal sense of I as a human being, growing in my understanding and development of what I call the mystery of life, really started feeling missing in my experience. So it wasn’t that I was … the usual thing is oh, he’s emotionally not available, or she’s emotionally not available because they work so much. I wasn’t having that kind of a challenge at all. I was available to my friends and things like that. I had a relationship and so forth. I did not have this inner sense.”

Congratulations to Mr. Moffitt for having turned to such internal development. Nevertheless, another way to develop internally is to learn to maintain calm in the eye of the storm, which means that we can develope internally right now, right where we are.